"Frederick Bissett…"
The antagonism cut across the room. Nothing new and he could cope with it. Nobody loved the man from the Security Service.
"What about Bissett?"
"Just running a routine check."
" A s I understand it, the matter at the Gate was cleared up to the complete satisfaction of the Security Officer."
"Well, you know the form, you working for government just the same as me, these things sort of have a way of developing their own momentum… "
"Come to the point… What do you want to know?"
"I just want to talk about Dr Bissett."
Rutherford didn't have a notebook out, and he hadn't wired himself with the pocket cassette recorder that he carried in his attache case.
"What about Bissett?"
"His work."
"You're not cleared to hear about his work."
"Let's say, the quality of his work…"
"It is quite satisfactory."
"But he needed to take work home."
" W e are not all time servers, Mr Rutherford. When we have a job to do, then we get it done."
"Would it not have been more natural for Bissett to have requested permission to take those two files off the Establishment?"
"I can't recall exactly the circumstances that day, perhaps I wasn't here."
Rutherford noted it, the hesitation. He would remember that.
It was safe to assume that the Security Officer had spoken to Boll already. The man gave away that he had been warned.
"Is he a good worker?"
"I 've no reason to think otherwise."
"A good member of the team in this building?"
"Quite… satisfactory."
"A man who makes friends?"
"It's difficult, Mr Rutherford, to be well liked here. We're not a soccer squad. We are a group of expert nuclear scientists. We have our own work to get on with, that's how we live. Is this a social club? No, it is not. Do we prop up a bar all night? No, we don't. Most of us, from the style and nature of our work, are private people. I doubt, Mr Rutherford, that where you live you are the life and soul of your neighbourhood."
Point scored. Rutherford took it. Penny always said that he was so private that the rest of the street wouldn't know he was alive.
"I am merely trying to establish the motives of Dr Bissett, in taking classified files out of his office, in direct contradiction of standing instructions."
"Then you'd better ask him."
"I will. Is Bissett in line for promotion?"
"I don't know, not my decision."
"Would you recommend him for promotion?"
"I haven't made up my mind."
"Would this business affect his chance of promotion?"
"I would have thought the quality of his work would determine that, not a moment of silliness."
" T o your knowledge, are his financial affairs in order?"
"I haven't the faintest idea."
"There are usually signs… "
"That's something else you'll have to ask him."
He was at the door. He could be ingratiating when it suited him. He thanked Boll for his help.
"I will be seeing Dr Bissett, but I will be seeing other people first. I don't want the nature of this enquiry discussed at all. I can count on your co-operation, I know."
He had been with Boll for 35 minutes, and in that time he had heard not a kind word about Bissett. No praise, no affection, no support.
James thought that to be interesting.
Colt had parked on Praed Street, in Paddingion, close to the hotel. He had booked and paid for the room. He had arranged for the canapes from the kitchen, for the whisky and the gin and the splits.
He wondered if Bissett would show.
Much of the work was routine, and it was just routine that it should be recorded that the radio signals that afternoon from the Delence Ministry in Baghdad to the Embassy in London had increased above their usual volume. It was also noted that the code used was of a different pattern to that usually employed.
The signals were recorded at the Government Communications Headquarters at Cheltenham in the west of England. In the Middle East Department priority was at that lime given to transmissions from Iran and the guerrilla groups in the Lebanon, but notification of the traffic surge was filed.
Likewise, it was basic routine that a tape would be sent each evening from the Telecom exchange in Newbury to Curzon Street. With the many intercepts ordered by Curzon Street, it was impossible to detach someone from the Service to monitor each interception. For those intercepts that did not have the highest priority a tape recorder, installed only by senior management, could be hooked to a number and activated by incoming and outgoing calls. The tape would be messengered to London each evening. Just routine.
"It's good of you to see me, sir."
"We'll get this straight from the start, Mr Rutherford. If 5000 people here think it good enough to call me Basil, then Basil it will have to be for you as well."
Rutherford couldn't help but like him. The Security Officer had told him that Basil Curtis was the principal innovator on the Establishment. He knew that he lived in Boundary Hall, permanently cramped into a single room, that his only company was the one cat allowed in the accommodation block, that he rode a bicycle, that when he went to Los Alamos he was considered too valuable to be sent on a commercial flight and had to put up with an R. A. F. transporter. And the Security Officer had said, first time the creature had smiled, that Curtis was paid more than the Director because some joker in charge of Special Pay Additions at the Ministry had evaluated his work, compared his salary with American salaries, and put in the extra so that he wouldn't defect to Los Alamos or Sandia or Livermore. The Security Officer had added that Curtis would have worked at the Establishment, just as happily, just as successfully, for a machine fitter's weekly money.
"Well, Basil, thank you anyway."
They walked on a sanded path that ran through copses of birch alongside the edge of C area, towards the Establishment's power station. It had stopped raining, and the late afternoon skies had cleared. There was a sharp wind. Rutherford was shivering in his raincoat, whipped cold. Curtis wore thin slacks and old leather sandals and an open sports shirt under his pullover. There was an air sampler barging against his barrel chest. There was a pipe Curtis wasn't tall, wouldn't have made it into the old Metropolitan Police, but he exuded strength and presence. Rutherford wasn't paid to like people, he rarely did at first sight, but he instinctively warmed towards this man.
" S o, you're a spycatcher… "
"On the bottom rung."
"A hunter of traitors…"
"A washer of bottles, really."
" A n d you're investigating the unhappy Dr Bissett…?"
"That's about it."
"We've never had a spy here, nor a traitor." A throaty chuckle.
"Well, if we have, we haven't known about it."
" D i d you ever meet Fuchs?"
"Cocky little Klaus Fuchs, no, before my time. He was never here, of course. He was before this place was set up. i am Harwell', that was his boast. Dead now, poor old thing, plonked away in East Germany somewhere. He would have hated to see Honecker and his gang given the bird. And it's just as well he's dead, because it's come out since that most of the stuff he bunged at the Soviets was false. Turns out they learned more from sampling air particles from the atmosphere after the American tests than ever they learned from Fuchs' material. That's enough to make a man frightfully depressed, when he's spent nine years in gaol and 30 years in East Germany for his efforts… They're not relevant now, Fuchs and Nunn May and Pontecorvo, they were committed to a political ideology that's gone up the chimney… "
" S o, what's today's spy?"